World News

My daughter was clearly excited when she came home from her first day at school last June. In between giggles, she blurted out, in Filipino, what seemed almost like a secret: “Our teacher is male.”

New research by the Australian Catholic University (ACU) of ABS Labour Force data has revealed that for the last 20 years as few as one in five Australian primary school teachers have been male.

The ACU reviewed the country's most populous states and found that in 2014:
 
16 per cent of NSW primary school teachers were men
18 per cent of Victorian primary school teachers were men

Many children will never encounter a male employee in their early years of care and education. Does it matter? Asker municipality in Norway has labored for many years to increase the number of men in childcare. It is our belief that children should be entitled to meet both men and women as teachers and caregivers.

To this end, we will be hosting an international conference in Asker 21-22 october.

Objectives:

My names Jeremy and I'm a 25 year old male working in a long day care centre. I have been doing so for about 6 years and have 2 modules left in my diploma and I'm smashing through it. I have had it for about 3 months and I'm nearly done. I'm just wondering if there are any other males on this website or males who work in your centers.

New Waikato primary teaching graduates are struggling to find work, with some schools seeing 100 applicants applying for the one job.

While Waikato high schools have the opposite problem - with trouble filling certain positions.

Teachers are being told they may need to be more flexible in where they live to secure a job, and many are having to start off in a fixed-term job to get to permanent one.

Mothers outnumbered fathers at our primary school sports day last week in the normal ratio for a day in the working week – maybe 10/1.

Among the staff and volunteers organising the event, however, women outnumbered men by more like 20/1.

Generally speaking, gender equality in the U.S. and other Western countries has involved women moving into men’s spheres.  We have not seen an equivalent migration of men into women’s spheres.  Accordingly, while women have integrated many male occupations (they are now, for example, 50% or more of law and medical students), many female-dominated ones remain heavily female.

A brief personal perspective

A number of years ago when I was teaching English to students of other languages in Hong Kong, I did some work for an internation kindergarten. My job was to create a programme to promote language for children who were about to leave for primary school. Having taught children of all ages at primary and secondary levels, I particularly enjoyed my time with the kindergarten group and decided to pursue a career as an early childhood teacher.

A new scheme has been set up to help encourage more men to enter the childcare profession in Lancashire.

The Lancashire Men in Childcare Network has been established by Andrew Clifford, managing director of the First Class Childcare Group, which has bases in Barrow, Whalley, Accrington and Clayton-le-Moors.

My husband recently moved abroad with work, returning on average for a week every month. We joke that he’s a tourist in the family, but it’s not always funny.

The Ministry of Education appears at a loss as to how to resolve the chronic shortage of male teachers, a challenge hampered by both red flags and red tape.

Despite a public relations offensive from the ministry, the number of male teachers in both primary and secondary schools has continued to drop during the past 10 years.

History was made this week, as Noirin O'Sullivan became the first woman ever appointed Garda Commissioner. This means the country's top two justice jobs are now occupied by women. Is the move towards gender balance in the workplace finally getting under way?

One of the guidelines issued to schools by the Department of Public Instruction, following an increase in cases of sexual assaults, was mandatory police verification of all male staff in schools.

Steps include ascertaining the antecedents of the teacher, by conducting background checks with their neighbours. These measures initiated by the Police has put the staff in an embarrassing situation, allege teacher associations. The male teachers were being stigmatised, they contend.

The Government should do more to encourage boys and men to work in the childcare sector, according to a new briefing by the Fatherhood Institute.

The document calls on the Government to require careers advisers to actively promote childcare jobs to boys and men, while supporting girls and women in choosing careers that are not traditionally considered ‘female’.

Childcare Management Company (CMC) has secured Youth in Partnership World (YIP) as its partner for a new project addressing the extremely low number of male workers in the childcare sector.